Neighbors: Life Stories Of The Other Half Part 4

But it proved a harder task than I had thought. None of the widows I knew had six children. The charitable societies had no family that fitted my friend's case. But in time I found people who knew about Mrs. Josefy. The children were right--so many boys and so many girls; what they told me of the mother made me want to know more. I went over to East Eleventh Street at once. On the way the feeling grew upon me that I had found my friend's Christmas present--I forgot to say that it was on Christmas Eve--and when I saw them and gathered something of the fight that splendid little woman had waged for her brood those eight long years, I knew that my search was over. When we had set up a Christmas tree together, to the wild delight of the children, and I had ordered a good dinner from a neighboring restaurant on my friend's account, I hastened back to tell him of my good luck and his. I knew he was late at the office with his mail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WHEN WE HAD SET UP A CHRISTMAS TREE TOGETHER, TO THE WILD DELIGHT OF THE CHILDREN."]

Half-way across town it came to me with a sense of shock that I had forgotten something. Mrs. Josefy had told me that she scrubbed in a public building, but where I had not asked. Perhaps it would not have seemed important to you. It did to me, and when I had gone all the way back and she answered my question, I knew why. Where do you suppose she scrubbed? In the Presbyterian Building! Under his own roof was the neighbor he sought. Almost they touched elbows, yet were they farther apart than the poles. Were, but no longer to be. The very next day brought my friend and his wife in from their Jersey home to East Eleventh Street.

Long years after I found this entry on the register, under date January 20, 1899:

"Mrs. Josefy states that she never had such a happy Christmas since she came to this country. The children were all so happy, and every one had been so kind to them."

It was the beginning of better days for the Josefy family. Weary stretches of hard road there were ahead yet, but they were no longer lonesome. The ladies' committee that had once so hotly blamed her were her friends to the last woman, for she had taught them with her splendid pluck what it should mean to be a mother of Americans. They did not offer to carry her then any more than before, but they went alongside with words of neighborly cheer and saw her win over every obstacle. Two years later finds her still working in the Presbyterian Building earning sixteen dollars a month and leaving her home at five in the morning. Her oldest boy is making four dollars and a half a week, and one of the girls is learning dressmaking. The others are all in school. One may be sure without asking that they are not laggards there. When the youngest, at twelve, is wanted by her friends of the mission board to "live out" with them, the mother refuses to let her go, at the risk of displeasing her benefactors. The child must go to school and learn a trade. Three years more, and all but the youngest are employed. Mrs. Josefy has had a long illness, but she reports that she can help herself. They are now paying fourteen dollars a month rent. On April 6, 1904, the last entry but one is made on the register: the family is on dry ground and the "case is closed."

The last but one. That one was added after a gap of eight years when I made inquiries for the Josefys the other day. Eight years is a long time in the Charities Buildings with a heavy burden of human woe and failure.

Perhaps for that very reason they had not forgotten Mrs. Josefy, but they had lost trace of her. She had left her old home in Eleventh Street, and all that was known was that she was somewhere up near Fort Was.h.i.+ngton. I asked that they find her for me, and a week later I read this entry in the register, where, let us hope, the case of the Josefys is now closed for all time:

"The Josefys live now at No. -- West One Hundred and Eighty --st Street in a handsome flat of six sunny rooms. The oldest son, who is a cas.h.i.+er in a broker's office on a salary of $35 a week, is the head of the family. His brother earns $20 a week in a downtown business. Two of the daughters are happily married; another is a stenographer. The youngest, the baby of the dark days in the East Side tenement, was graduated from school last year and is ready to join the army of workers. The mother begins to feel her years, but is happy with her children."

Some Christmas Eve I will go up and see them and take my friend from the Presbyterian Building along.

This is the story of a poor woman, daughter of a proud and chivalrous people, whose sons have helped make great fortunes grow in our land and have received scant pay and scantier justice in return, and of whom it is the custom of some Americans to speak with contempt as "Huns."

WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD

The first snowflake was wafted in upon the north wind to-day. I stood in my study door and watched it fall and disappear; but I knew that many would come after and hide my garden from sight ere long. What will the winter bring us? When they wake once more, the flowers that now sleep snugly under their blanket of dead leaves, what shall we have to tell?

The postman has just brought me a letter, and with it lying open before me, my thoughts wandered back to "the hard winter" of a half-score seasons ago which none of us has forgotten, when women and children starved in cold garrets while men roamed gaunt and hollow-eyed vainly seeking work.

I saw the poor tenement in Rivington Street where a cobbler and his boy were fighting starvation all alone save for an occasional visit from one of Miss Wald's nurses who kept a watchful eye on them as on so many another tottering near the edge in that perilous time, ready with the lift that brought back hope when all things seemed at an end. One day she found a stranger in the flat, a man with close-cropped hair and a hard look that told their own story. The cobbler eyed her uneasily, and, when she went, followed her out and made excuses. Yes! he was just out of prison and had come to him for shelter. He used to know him in other days, and Jim was not--

She interrupted him and shook her head. Was it good for the boy to have that kind of a man in the house?

The cobbler looked at her thoughtfully and touched her arm gently.

"This," he said, "ain't no winter to let a feller from Sing Sing be on the street."

The letter the postman brought made me see all this and more in the snowflake that fell and melted in my garden. It came from a friend in the far West, a gentle, high-bred lady, and told me this story: Her sister, who devotes her life to helping the neighbor, had just been on a visit to her home. One day my friend noticed her wearing an odd knitted shawl, and spoke of it.

"Yes," said she, "that is the shawl the cook gave me."

"The cook?" with lifted eyebrows, I suppose. And then she heard how.

One day, going through the kitchen of the inst.i.tution where she teaches, she had seen the cook in tears and inquired the cause. The poor woman sobbed out that her daughter had come home to die. The doctors had said that she might live perhaps ten days, no longer, and early and late she cried for her mother to be with her. But she had vainly tried every way to get a cook to take her place--there was none, and her child was dying in the hospital.

"And I told her to go to her right away, I would see to that; that was all," concluded my friend's sister; "and she gave me this shawl when she came back, and I took it, of course. She had worked it for the daughter that died."

But it was not all. For during ten days of sweltering July heat that gentle, delicate woman herself superintended the kitchen, did the cooking, and took the place of the mother who was soothing her dying child's brow, and no one knew it. Not here, that is. No doubt it is known, with a hundred such daily happenings that make the real story of human life, where that record is kept and cherished.

And clear across the continent it comes to solve a riddle that had puzzled me. Recently I had long arguments with a friend about religion and dogmas that didn't help either of us. At the end of three weeks we were farther apart than when we began, and the arguments had grown into controversy that made us both unhappy. We had to have a regular treaty of peace to get over it. I know why now. The snowflake and my friend's letter told me.

Those two, the cobbler and the woman, were real Christians. They had the secret. They knew the neighbor, if neither had ever heard of dogma or creed. Our arguments were worse than wasted, though we both meant well, for we were nearer neighbors when we began than when we left off.

I am not learned in such things. Perhaps I am wrong. No doubt dogmas are useful--to wrap things in--but even then I would not tuck in the ends, lest we hide the neighbor so that we cannot see him. After all, it is what is _in_ the package that counts. To me it is the evidence of such as these that G.o.d lives in human hearts--that we are molded in his image despite flaws and failures in the casting--that keeps alive the belief that we shall wake with the flowers to a fairer spring. Is it not so with all of us?

THE CITY'S HEART

"Bos.h.!.+" said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, "all bos.h.!.+ A city has no heart. It's incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet's dream, my good fellow; pretty but moons.h.i.+ne!"

We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. The placid river was before us, with the moonlight upon it. Far as the eye reached, up and down the stream, the sh.o.r.es lay outlined by rows of electric lamps, like strings of s.h.i.+ning pearls; red lights and green fights moved upon the water. From a roofed-over pier near by came the joyous shouts of troops of children, and the rhythmic tramp of many feet to the strains of "Could you be true to eyes of blue if you looked into eyes of brown?" A "play-pier" in evening session.

I looked at my friend. He stood gazing out over the river, hat in hand, the gentle sea-breeze caressing the lock at his temple that is turning gray. Something he started to say had died on his lips. He was listening to the laughter of the children. What thoughts of days long gone, before the office and the market reports shut youth and suns.h.i.+ne out of his life, came to soften the hard lines in his face, I do not know. As I watched, the music on the pier died away in a great hush. The river with its lights was gone; my friend was gone. The years were gone with their burden. The world was young once more.

I was in a court-room full of men with pale, stern faces. I saw a child brought in, carried in a horse-blanket, at the sight of which men wept aloud. I saw it laid at the feet of the judge, who turned his face away, and in the stillness of that court-room I heard a voice raised claiming for the human child the protection men had denied it, in the name of the homeless cur of the street. And I heard the story of little Mary Ellen told again, that stirred the souls of a city and roused the conscience of a world that had forgotten. The sweet-faced missionary who found Mary Ellen was there, wife of a newspaper man--happy augury; where the gospel of faith and the gospel of facts join hands the world moves. She told how the poor consumptive in the dark slum tenement, at whose bedside she daily read the Bible, could not die in peace while "the child they called Mary Ellen" was beaten and tortured in the next flat; and how on weary feet she went from door to door of the powerful, vainly begging mercy for it and peace for her dying friend. The police told her to furnish evidence, prove crime, or they could not move; the societies said: "bring the child to us legally, and we will see; till then we can do nothing"; the charitable said, "it is dangerous to interfere between parent and child; better let it alone." And the judges said that it was even so; it was for them to see that men walked in the way laid down, not to find it--until her woman's heart rebelled in anger against it all, and she sought the great friend of the dumb brute, who made a way.

"The child is an animal," he said. "If there is no justice for it as a human being, it shall at least have the rights of the cur in the street.

It shall not be abused."

And as I looked I knew that I was where the first charter of the Children's rights was written under warrant of that made for the dog; for from that dingy court-room, whence a wicked woman went to jail, thirty years ago came forth the Children's Society, with all it has meant to the world's life. It is quickening its pulse to this day in lands and among peoples who never spoke the name of my city and Mary Ellen's. For her--her life has run since like an even summer stream between flowery sh.o.r.es. When last I had news of her, she was the happy wife of a prosperous farmer up-State.

The lights on the river shone out once more. From the pier came a chorus of children's voices singing "Sunday Afternoon" as only East Side children can. My friend was listening intently. Aye, well did I remember the wail that came to the Police Board, in the days that are gone, from a pastor over there. "The children disturb our wors.h.i.+p," he wrote; "they gather in the street at my church and sing and play while we would pray"; and the bitter retort of the police captain of the precinct: "They have no other place to play; better pray for sense to help them get one." I saw him the other day--the preacher--singing to the children in the tenement street and giving them flowers; and I knew that the day of sense and of charity had swept him with it.

The present is swallowed up again, and there rises before me the wraith of a village church in the far-off mountains of Pennsylvania. It is Sunday morning at midsummer. In the pulpit a young clergyman is preaching from the text: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even the least, ye did it unto me." The sun peeps through the windows, where climbing roses nod. In the tall maples a dove is cooing; the drowsy hum of the honey-bee is on the air. But he recks not of these, nor of the peaceful day. His soul has seen a vision of hot and stony streets, of squalid homes, of hard-visaged, unlovely childhood, of mankind made in His image twisted by want and ignorance into monstrous deformity: and the message he speaks goes straight to the heart of the plain farmers on the benches; His brethren these, and steeped in the slum! They gather round him after the service, their hearts burning within them.

I see him speeding the next day toward the great city, a messenger of love and pity and help. I see him return before the week's end, nine starved urchins clinging to his hands and the skirts of his coat, the first Fresh Air party that went out of New York twoscore years ago. I see the big-hearted farmers take them into their homes and hearts. I see the sun and the summer wind put back color in the wan cheek, and life in the shrunken and starved frame. I hear the message of one of the little ones to her chums left behind in the tenement: "I can have two pieces of pie to eat, and n.o.body says nothing if I take three pieces of cake"; and I know what it means to them. Laugh? Yes! laugh and be glad. The world has sorrow enough. Let in the suns.h.i.+ne where you can, and know that it means life to these, life now and a glimpse of the hereafter. I can hear it yet, the sigh of the tired mother under the trees on Twin Island, our Henry-street children's summer home: "If heaven is like this, I don't care how soon I go."

For the sermon had wings; and whithersoever it went blessings sprang in its track. Love and justice grew; men read the brotherhood into the sunlight and the fields and the woods, and the brotherhood became real. I see the minister, no longer so young, sitting in his office in the "Tribune" building, still planning Fresh Air holidays for the children of the hot, stony city. But he seeks them himself no more. A thousand churches, charities, kindergartens, settlements, a thousand preachers and doers of the brotherhood, gather them in. A thousand trains of many crowded cars carry them to the homes that are waiting for them wherever men and women with warm hearts live. The message has traveled to the farthest sh.o.r.es, and nowhere in the Christian world is there a place where it has not been heard and heeded. Wherever it has, there you have seen the heart of man laid bare; and the sight is good.

"'Way--down--yonder--in--the--corn-field," brayed the band, and the shrill chorus took up the words. At last they meant something to them. It was worth living in the day that taught that lesson to the children of the tenements. Other visions, new scenes, came trooping by on the refrain: the farm-homes far and near where they found, as the years pa.s.sed and the new love grew and warmed the hearts, that they had entertained angels unawares; the host of boys and girls, greater than would people a city, that have gone out to take with the old folks the place of the lads who would not stay on the land, and have grown up st.u.r.dy men and women, good citizens, governors of States some of them, cheating the slum of its due; the floating hospitals that carry their cargoes of white and helpless little sufferers down the bay in the hot summer days, and bring them back at night sitting bolt upright at the supper-table and hammering it with their spoons, shouting for more; the new day that s.h.i.+nes through the windows of our school-houses, dispelling the nightmare of dry-as-dust pedagoguery, and plants bra.s.s-bands upon the roof of the school, where the children dance and are happy under the stars; that builds play-piers and neighborhood parks in which never a sign "Keep off the Gra.s.s" shall stand to their undoing; that grows school-gardens in the steps of the kindergarten, makes truck-farmers on city lots of the toughs they would have bred, lying waste; that strikes the fetters of slavery from childhood in home and workshop, and breaks the way for a better to-morrow. Happy vision of a happy day that came in with the tears of little Mary Ellen.

Truly they were not shed in vain.

There was a pause in the play on the pier. Then the strains of "America"

floated down to us where we stood.

"Long may our land be bright With Freedom's holy light,"

came loud and clear in the childish voices. They knew it by heart, and no wonder. To their fathers, freedom was but an empty name, a mockery. My friend stood bareheaded till the last line was sung:

"Great G.o.d, our King!"

then he put on his hat and nodded to me to come. We walked away in silence. To him, too, there had come in that hour the vision of the heart of the great city; and before it he was dumb.